Excerpt provided by Syndetics

The man lay with his head propped on the book. The back of his skull felt hot, not hot and sticky as his forehead did, but as though his head had been packed with embers. There were ashes in his mouth. He opened his eyes and saw the neutral roof of the train. He breathed consciously, hating the flat air, and it seemed to him that every dead thing in his life was crouching over him, taking the air. He got up suddenly, too quickly, saw the train in a whirligig out of the bullseyes of his sockets. Round and round the neutral patterned seats, round and round the faux wood tables, the still train spinning. Twisted faces lurched at him as he was caught in a kaleidoscope of arms. Round and round, the sick of his stomach, and the rouletting train. He fell. He fell at the window with both fists, impossible, against the safety glass. In his dream terror he saw the hammer, or was it the axe, strapped snug in a little red holder against the heave. He put his hand through the shattering plastic, and heard somewhere, a long way off, the dull ugly bell that warned him to go back to the schoolroom, back to the operating theatre, that the oxygen was low, that someone was at the door to see him. The door. He found the door, sealed in its protective, insulating rubber, and with all his strength, he brought the axe to cleave the seam. The vacuum dispersed. The doors bounced apart, just enough for him to shove the haft between them, and then he thought that two angels came on either side of his wounded arms, and pulled the doors back, and off their runners. He let the axe fall, and stepped off the loose steel plates, on to the concrete harbour. Ahead, the cliffs, the sea, the white beach deserted, and the light. He was carrying the book. Years ago he had been in a car crash. He had been driving steadily, the smooth road, clear, controlled, then, as he tried to turn the wheel, the car disobeyed. The servile box of leather and steel turned on him, turned over and over on him, the tarmac rearing up off the hard core and coming through the windscreen at his face. He had been listening to Turandot and the compact disc jammed but would not break; La speranza, La speranza, La speranza, why had he not died? He often thought of it and wondered what the grace was for and why he had never acknowledged it. A second life. For what? Only to do again what he had done before but this time blunted by repetition? When he had crawled out from under the molten car, he had walked purposefully for two miles, before a police car picked him up. He said, 'There's nothing the matter Officer. I am a doctor.' He had shown them the tattered ribbons of his driving licence. Later, much later, well again, he had joked about the effects of shock on himself, effects he had handled in others so many times over so many hospital years. 'You know,' he said, 'the odd thing was that I truly believed myself well and whole. I had a broken arm, a fractured ankle, burns, and I was bleeding. Nevertheless, I believed myself well.' He knew the physiology of it, of course he did, and yet it troubled him. In what other ways did he deceive himself out of his wounded life? From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Since publication of her Whitbread Award-winning first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (LJ 10/15/87), Winterson has racked up numerous prizes; her Written on the Body (LJ 2/15/93) made several regional best sellers lists here. This philosophical treatise cum novel features three characters traveling on a high-speed train: priest-turned-surgeon Handel, a young woman artist named Picasso, and Sappho, still alive because art is immortal. Look for a Vanity Fair profile. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Set on a train traveling through a dystopian future England, Winterson's latest novel is a patchwork meditation on identity and artistry. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Each of Winterson's poetic, philosophical, and witty novels, from Sexing the Cherry (1990) to Written on the Body (1993), takes us by surprise, and her newest work is no exception. For instance, the characters in this metaphoric, historical, sensual, and often wrenching tale are named Handel, Picasso, and Sappho, but Handel is a doctor and Picasso a woman. Sappho is the much lauded yet vilified lyric poet of antiquity, but she also walks the streets of London at the bitter end of the twentieth century, and all three characters cross paths at odd or pivotal moments. The fourth character, the bawd alluded to in the title, is Doll Sneerpiece, the heroine of an old book Handel is reading on a train. This train, spanning the distance from the city to the sea, symbolizes time, just as a house is a metaphor for memory. As Winterson spins the intriguing, dramatic, and significant tales of each of her characters, she satisfies our craving for story but accomplishes so much more, articulating the meaning of time, art, passion, and hypocrisy in prose charged with the pulse and imagery of poetry. --Donna Seaman

Kirkus Book Review

In what is more a brilliant if idiosyncratic colloquium than a conventional story, Winterson's symbolic protagonists discuss, opine, and reminisce as they travel together on a high-speed train. In chapters arranged like a musical composition (the frontispiece announces ``a piece for three voices and a bawd''), Winterson (Written on the Body, 1992, etc.) makes her three characters Handel, Picasso, and Sappho alternately recall their pasts, comment on art, history, and religion, and mourn their present condition. With the exception of Sappho, none of the characters are the same as their real-life counterparts: Handel likes music, but he's a former priest and currently a doctor; Picasso, a young woman who paints, has tried to commit suicide, having been sexually abused by her brother, and has been subsequently hospitalized. Meanwhile, the train and the journey itself are more symbolic than actual: Only fleeting references are made to the realities of travel and time as the characters move back and forth across the centuries. Discussions of art take center stage as Picasso observes that ``she could never be satisfied by approximation...either she was an artist or she was not''; Sappho admits she loves ``the deception of sand and sea...what appears is not what it is''; and Handel confesses ``I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving-bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish- tank.'' But more poignant are the personal confessions. Handel is particularly troubled by his past: He cut off the healthy breast of a prostitute, refused to perform an abortion on a raped woman, and had an unorthodox relationship with a Vatican cardinal. There is no triumphant end to the journey, only a few bleak epiphanies. Better in the parts than the whole, seeming more an excuse for a book than a book in itself.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford.

Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award.

(Bowker Author Biography)